In this article it is argued that epistemological concerns about
the archiving of qualitative data are mis-directed. Almost all
interpretive data makes either an implicit or explicit claim to
knowledge in a broader context than the research project on which it is
based. The ability to re-interpret these data in the light of changing
broader contexts is entirely consistent with the project of interpretive
and constructivist epistemologies which frame reality as socially
constructed and contextually contingent. The increasing reflexivity of
qualitative research can only assist the future researcher, providing it
serves its aims of articulating and deepening the understanding of the
original research environment and the motives of researcher and
participant. The decision to re-interpret data should be one based on
professional skill rather than epistemological barriers. Qualitative
researchers should view the project as one for the long term, rather
than as a short-term threat to the validity of their primary analysis.
These arguments are made separately from ongoing debates about the
ethical and confidentiality concerns of qualitative archiving.

Name: Australian Journal of Social Issues Publisher: Australian Council of Social Service Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: Sociology and social work Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Australian Council of Social
Service ISSN:0157-6321

As research funding organisations in Australia and elsewhere become
more prescriptive about the treatment and storage of research data, a
debate has developed about the suitability of qualitative data for
archiving and re-analysis in the future (Broom et al. 2009). To date
this debate has revolved around two central questions: firstly the
epistemological suitability of qualitative data for reuse by unknown
users at a future time; and secondly, the ethical and privacy
considerations of making sometimes sensitive or compromising data
available for future use. In this article I focus on the first of these
two questions which centres on the claim by some researchers that
qualitative data are not suitable for use by researchers in the future
as they are the product of unique contextual synthesis between
researcher and research participants. I argue that epistemological
concerns about the suitability of qualitative data for future use are an
unnecessary distraction from the second question of consent and the
protection of research participant confidentiality covered elsewhere by
other authors (e.g. Heaton, 2004; Parry & Mauthner, 2004; Richardson
& Godfrey, 2003).

The qualitative tradition in the social sciences can be defined in
broad terms as an interpretivist project that is an attempt by
researchers to achieve an understanding of the social world from the
perspective of those who experience it (Schwandt 2000). This lies in
contrast to the quantitative project, which for the most part seeks to
provide causal explanations by the abstraction and incremental analysis
of nomothetic evidence. In addition to the distinction from quantitative
social science, the interpretivist project plays host to a number of
different epistemological standpoints, and although there is a large
methodological literature on these different epistemologies, the
majority of research output does not labour the reader with an explicit
ontological or epistemological declaration.

However, what is central to all interpretive social science is the
idea of context, which can be understood as the set of conditions under
which qualitative research takes place. These conditions include macro
socio-structural factors such as temporal location, political climate,
geography and cultural conditions and tensions. These macro-contextual
factors are either implicitly or explicitly manifest in the micro
contextual features of qualitative research including the biographical
characteristics of the participant and the researcher; the qualities of
their relationship; the circumstances, including stage management of the
research site; and, the nature, funding and objectives of the research
project. All these factors, macro and micro, contribute to a unique set
of spatio-temporal circumstances for each qualitative research
endeavour. However, as I will argue below, it is the micro- contextual
or first hand aspects of qualitative research which are emphasised by
those who use context as an epistemological barrier to the re-analysis
of qualitative data in the future.

A loss of context: the critique of archiving

The epistemological aspect of the archiving debate, regarding the
suitability of storing qualitative data in an archive accessible to
others, has for the most part centred on the legitimacy of qualitative
data once it has been removed from both its original context, and also
from the control of those researchers who were responsible for the
original design, implementation and analysis of a particular qualitative
research project. Moore (2007: 4.2) describes an 'almost obsessive
attention to context' in the literature on re-use of qualitative
data, and that without first hand experience of this context, another
researcher risks misrepresenting that data, or 'just getting it
wrong'.

Critics of the archiving of qualitative research projects question
how much of the sense of this context can be retained through storage of
textual, visual or aural artefacts of research; and then the
epistemological appropriateness of using data generated in the course of
unique interaction between researcher and 'subject' for other
purposes. According to Mauthner et al. (1998: 742), qualitative research
'celebrates the reflexive role of the researcher', who becomes
a major part of the research context and, as distance lessens the memory
of collusion between the researcher and research subject, the data
become useful only as a historical record, or for comparative
methodological purposes, rather than as a new source of data for fresh
analysis and theoretical integration (see also Corti 2000; Parry &
Mauthner 2005).

Heaton (2004: 60) refers to the same micro-contextual problem of
the researcher 'not having been there' in the secondary
analysis of qualitative data; and according to Dale (1988: 15), 'it
seems unlikely that the re-analysis of either interview transcripts or
field notes by an outsider could give more than a partial understanding
of the research issues'. In a similar vein, Denzin (2009) argues
that the production of qualitative research should be viewed as a
performance within which the third party is permitted to watch rather
than to become a part of, in contrast to the treatment of research as a
'commodity' to be packaged and sold. According to Denzin, to
make data available to future researchers implies that qualitative data
are to be subjected to a positivist paradigm, that there is a particular
truth in the data waiting to be discovered by other researchers. He adds
that as qualitative researchers:

We perform our interpretations and invite audiences to experience
these performances, to live their way into the scenes, moments and lives
we are writing, and talking about. Our empirical materials can't be
fudged, mis-represented, altered or distorted, because they are life
experiences. They are ethno-dramas (Denzin, 2009: 151).

Similar concerns were expressed during recent focus groups with
Australian academic researchers carried out in 2007 and 2008 by Broom et
al. (2009). For example, a senior lecturer summarises, in an informal
way, similar epistemological concerns to those expressed by other
authors:

Now, you draw a picture for yourself and if someone comes over and
says well that's a nice frog, well it wasn't a frog at all.
How upset can you be that they've got that reading, because
they've misread all of the contextual clues and cues and so forth?
Well the same thing happens, you know, when other people look at your
data set, it's trying to de-contextualise something that's so
contextualised that what are they going to find there? Well they might
find something that actually is wrong, fundamentally wrong because
they've misread contextual clues [italics added] (Broom et al.
2009: 1170).

It is this concern that another researcher will arrive at an
'incorrect' interpretation that I will explore in the
remainder of this paper. I will argue that any properly documented
qualitative material can and should be made available to future
researchers, ethical considerations notwithstanding.

Qualitative research and the wider context

Much of the criticism surrounding the epistemological suitability
of qualitative research for re-analysis at some unknown time in the
future assumes, theoretically at least, a constructionist epistemology.
This epistemological standpoint frames knowledge generated in the
research process as a situated achievement of researcher and
participant, a unique event, inseparable from its spatio-temporal
circumstances. The role of the researcher in this paradigm is to access
the lifeworld of the research participant and to attempt to provide a
reading of it as part of the analytical process. It is to offer a
construction of the participants' constructions (Schwandt 2000). In
his discussion of the interpretive project, Charles Taylor describes
this process of researcher construction and the creation of a
'correct' or 'good' interpretation as the one which
'makes sense of the original text: what is strange, mystifying,
puzzling, contradictory is no longer so, is accounted for' (1994:
182). It is uncontentious to claim that the original researcher, engaged
with the subject matter of the research, and with firsthand insight into
the research participants and environment of the original research
project should be the best placed to make this reading at that
particular time and place.

It is also uncontroversial to say that qualitative researchers
almost never limit their research conclusions to the narrow confines of
the actual research context. To do so would deny research its social
scientific consequence. In all social research, the researcher is
required to attribute a level of relevance to the reading of a
particular context, in other words, to take the meaning created within
the research context and apply it more widely. Despite the standard or
text book characterisation of qualitative research as a methodological
approach that is more concerned with communicating the nature of context
than it is to generalisation, almost all qualitative research appeals to
a set of contexts beyond the one in which it is actually produced. The
word 'generalisation' carries with it positivist overtones for
many interpretive researchers and it should be stressed that in this
case, it differs from that of quantitative research where a statistical
probability that a certain phenomenon will reproduce itself in a
particular population is offered. The type of generalisation made in
qualitative research is what Williams calls 'moderatum
generalisation' (Payne & Williams 2005; Williams 2000) and is
by its nature modest and context-driven, but what it does achieve is to:

... make clear the meaningful experiences of actors and
specifically why they believe the world is the way it is and if these
experiences can become moderatum generalisations then they can form the
basis of theories about process or structure (Williams 2000: 221-222).

Flyvbjerg (2004) makes a similar argument about the
generalisability of interpretive research by emphasising the
'concrete' nature of knowledge generated in a case study and
its value as bedrock for subsequent theory generation. The strength of
the qualitative case study lies in its ability to produce a context-rich
vehicle for understanding a particular social phenomenon or process.
However, for it to be valuable as social science, it must also be
capable of producing theoretical generalisations based on that
experience. That is, to take a range of data and by leaving them in
their proper context, synthesise them into a logically coherent and
plausible narrative or argument (Mason 2002) that has direct use in the
understanding of other similar situations, or a wider horizon, in
different times and places (Ruddin 2006). In the act of interpretation
the research project becomes an exercise in sense making, with reference
to structures, concepts or tropes which must, by necessity, have an
existence outside of that particular research act. This is in order to
communicate meaning to a third party (the reader), but also to engage
with those who have gone before them, such as other researchers and
theorists.

If these generalisations are to be made, then logically, authors
must also acknowledge that macro-context is manifest in the
micro-circumstances of their research act. While the original researcher
might claim to have privileged access to this micro-context, the
macro-context is in constant flux, particularly as conditions of late or
post modernity become more pervasive. The ability to revisit qualitative
data in light of social change may allow the future researcher to
attribute those participants with a degree of prescience about future
social conditions that the original researcher was in no position to
understand.

Prescience

To claim, as the critics of qualitative archiving do, that a future
researcher is liable to make a 'wrong' interpretation of their
data is to deny the changeability of this wider context and also, to lay
claim to an immutable objective 'truth' in the original data
and interpretation which is inconsistent with the anti-objectivist
epistemological foundation to which the same qualitative researchers
would lay claim.

The fact that qualitative researchers do make theoretical
generalisations underlines the project of qualitative research as one
that both recognises the existence of wider social context in the
micro-context of a research project and then in turn makes claims about
that wider context in light of the analysis of that research context. To
acknowledge the presence of a wider social and cultural meaning in a
research context the researcher cannot then claim to have absolute
privilege of access to the interpretive keys to unlock meaning in that
research situation. Many of those symbolic meanings, tropes, metaphors
and linguistic constructions are also available to other researchers
working with those socio-structural phenomena, and are open to further
or different interpretation. Research participants, including the
researchers themselves carry with them wider meanings and messages about
context which future researchers, with their own access to
socio-cultural meaning and the benefit of hindsight should be able to
access. To argue otherwise is to imply that the only claim that can be
made about a research project is an understanding of the processes by
which meaning was constructed in a particular or singular context,
rather than to draw any claims or lessons to other contexts in time and
space (Schwandt 1994).

The purpose and limits of re-analysis

New insights into existing qualitative data may not be that
interesting after only a decade. However, consider the implications of
current access to original qualitative material on school leavers in the
1950s; or Chinese immigrants to Northern Australia in the 1890s; or the
Hitler Youth in the 1930s. It is unlikely that researchers from these
eras would have been interested in the same conclusions that we might
with the benefit of hindsight and changed socio-cultural norms and
expectations. The loss of privileged interpretive insights of the
original researchers would be more than compensated by the ability of
future researchers to challenge past and present assumptions and reflect
upon the process of social change.

The purpose of the argument so far has been to demonstrate that
interpretive data are firstly context dependent, and that based on this
context, they are then generalisable, in a 'moderatum' and
theoretical way to further related contexts in time and space. However,
this being the case, why then should the original raw material of this
analysis, such as interview transcripts, audio records and other data,
be subject to further analysis by other researchers at a later date? The
response to this question rests on the basis that the claim to a more
general application to other contexts, which is a characteristic of
qualitative research, does not sit well with a simultaneous claim to the
impossibility of further or different interpretation of the same raw
material with the passage of time. As Lincoln and Guba note 'there
is a preoccupation in much of the literature on qualitative research to
distinguish the endeavour from the positivism that distinguishes much
quantitative research. The ontological focus of these claims is that
realities are 'multiple, constructed and holistic' as opposed
to the single and empirically tangible reality of the positivist
paradigm (Lincoln & Guba 1985: 37).

If this is the case a significant part of that reality construction
rests with the original researcher who, in good faith, brings to bear
the contextual features already listed above into play to provide a
reading of a research situation.

Context itself, nevertheless, is mutable and the temporal
circumstances of a research project are subject, and entitled to,
different readings over time. The truth claims of a particular research
act must be read on the proviso that they are taken in a particular time
and place. In this case the axiom the 'benefit of hindsight'
is more than a wistful conceit. It is the means by which sense can be
made of social change and may require a revisiting of primary data in
the light of contextual changes. The origins of a phenomenon not yet
known to the original researcher/s and therefore not incorporated into
the original analysis may offer themselves to a subsequent researcher
many years, or decades, into the future. The same data then have served
two (or more) different purposes during their life. In the ontological
and epistemological spirit of interpretive research, neither is
'wrong'. A claim to the impossibility of re-interpretation of
an archived context-dependent, or local, truth is a denial of the
mutability of truth/knowledge. This multiplicity of perspective is
central to the epistemology of those who, at the same time, claim
primacy of their own interpretation. This contradiction is important to
note, as serves to preserve the singularity of a particular
interpretation 'in aspic'. It is not necessary to
'disprove' or demolish the previous researchers' work.
Indeed neither is inherently weaker or stronger than the other--the
later analysis requires the earlier one for its coherence. The data have
been put into service for differing ends, perhaps acting as a
'commodity' as Denzin (2009) has warned against, but with
fungible meaning. It is consistent with a constructivist epistemology
that the context is revisited and knowledge is re-contextualised (Morse
1994) or re-incorporated with the benefit of intervening developments in
that field, process or phenomenon.

Hammersley (1997) makes the observation that the potential in the
archiving of qualitative material allows interpretive research to make
knowledge claims about social change, which is currently dominated by
longitudinal statistical methods. The ability to compare the changing
contextual circumstances over time of a particular phenomenon might give
far greater cause for optimism or pessimism than an abstract
probabilistic or correlational exposition of the same phenomenon. There
is also the possibility of using the same analysis and perhaps the same
conclusions drawn by a previous researcher to take a different (or more
daring) epistemological standpoint, drawing inferences and theoretical
possibilities that a previous, more objective or empirically naive
researcher may have been reluctant to undertake with the same data.
Again, this is not to say that secondary analysis can or should be used
for 'verification' or indeed even critique primary analysis on
its own terms. The secondary analyst can argue for a more convincing
version (of the truth), rather than a 'more correct'
interpretation but this argument must be based on improved access to
wider contextual data, the wisdom of hindsight and perhaps a more
sophisticated method. An argument by a subsequent researcher based on
better insight to the data on the same terms used by the original
researcher is unlikely to succeed.

The benefits of reflexivity

The stage management of a research site: the gender, age and
socio-cultural background of the participants as well as the researcher,
make a contribution to what is said and done and, perhaps more
importantly, what is not said and done during the course of a research
interaction. Accordingly, the participant's construction of events
can be influenced to a lesser or greater degree by the nature of the
research environment created by the researcher. For example, the female
adolescent victim of sexual assault might be prone to respond in
different ways to a middle aged male academic than she might be to a
female interviewer closer in age and life experience to her. In turn,
the skill and capacity for empathy of the respective interviewers might
also mitigate in unexpected ways.

While this has always been the case with qualitative research,
researchers are increasingly inviting the reader to participate in the
reflexive process of generating research data, where the researcher is
careful to reflect back on the conditions of the research and they ways
in which they may have affected what was said and done (Mason 2002).
Mauthner et al. (1998: 742) claim that in qualitative research 'for
some time the processes and products of data analysis have been seen as
a reflexive exercise through which texts are negotiated and where
meanings are made rather than found'. This reflexive project in
interpretive research is the result of a movement to acknowledge and
retain the role of the researcher as an actor in the construction of
research text or data.

A further criticism of the possibility for qualitative archiving
has been made on these grounds: that a process whereby 'the
researcher and the object of study 'affect each other mutually and
continually in the course of the research process' (Alvesson &
Skeoldberg 2000: 39) is not amenable to further interpretation by an
outsider. Research output becomes the reflexive joint construction of
data by the participant, who crafts her or his discourse, responses and
motives according to the perceived nature of the research project; and
the researcher who crafts the project according to her/his own
ambitions, theoretical proclivities and the nature of the participant.
It could be argued that this is the case for all social research, but
that in quantitative research it just happens with considerably more
distance between researcher and object. Those wary of the re-analysis of
qualitative data believe that only the original researcher can
communicate the intended meaning from reflexively constructed research,
as the only one privy to that reflexive process. This is almost
certainly the case and this is why it would be futile to re-analyse
qualitative data with a view to either replicating findings or indeed
testing the validity of the research on same terms as the original
researcher. In any case, as Hammersley (1997) reminds us, the pressures
of time on contemporary researchers is such that it would be very
unlikely that anyone would be able to devote the considerable time or
funds required to simply verify other researchers' analysis using
the same data.

However, in accord with the project of interpretivism and
particularly constructivism, that reality is socially constructed and
contingent, there remain other reasons to re-read original data. The
first of these is what C Wright Mills (1940) termed 'vocabularies
of motive' where 'Motives vary in content and character with
historical epochs and societal structures' (Mills 1940: 913).
Motives can be attributed equally to researcher and research subject and
the nature and linguistic construction of motives for participation, the
linguistic framing of research questions, emphasis on particular themes
and the absence of other themes all provide important analytical signs
to the way in which social phenomena were framed and understood when the
original research took place. These linguistic constructs are manifest
in language tropes, expressions, displays of patronage or submission or
dismissal and can be attributed to both research object and researcher
alike. If treated as more than just expressions of the narrow research
context they can provide subsequent researchers with important windows
into prevailing social forms or processes, allowing future researchers
to analyse not just the original data, but the original project.

The self conscious and recorded reflexivity of the original
researcher and subject can only assist the future researcher to achieve
this. This researcher reflexivity becomes all the more valuable if, as
Riach suggests:

It seeks to escape the 'self-fascinated observation of the
observer's writings and feelings' (Bourdieu and Wacquant
1992:72) through developing the notion of epistemic reflexivity, where
the processes of objectification we undertake as researchers become the
focus of analysis itself (Riach 2009: 359).

The reading of spatio-temporal cues is greatly enhanced by the
professional reflexivity of the original author and the disclosure of
research subject's reflexivity, along with thick and evocative
contextual cues relating to environment and era. The very project of
interpretive research, particularly those strands which support the
existence of multiple and context dependent realities cannot argue on
epistemological grounds for the future re-analysis of qualitative data
in light of future perspectives and new theoretical lenses. By making
data immune from secondary analysis the researcher is reifying one
version of reality despite the constant flux in the wider contextual
setting that informs that research. If the reflexive project is true to
its ideals then the full and research-focussed reflexive revelations of
a research project can only add to the value of this data in the future.

The challenge to future researchers then becomes one of
professional skill and judgement rather than an epistemological
quandary. Fielding and Fielding (2000: 679) in a pragmatic vein argue
that 'researchers are used to tracing the mediating effects of
reflexivity in primary data analysis and we believe that the recovery of
contextual features in secondary data analysis is a practical rather
than an epistemological matter'. If the original researcher can
provide contextual pointers such as original research questions and
focus, the genesis of the project including funding sources, the method
of recruitment or identification of research participants and the stage
management of the research environment, then the future analyst should
have further basis upon which to make a professional judgement about the
worth of original research for her or his current concerns. This
provides a focus for re-analysis, rather than re-analysis based on the
same assumptions.

Conclusion

A research paradigm consists of an epistemological, ontological and
methodological worldview or metaphysical belief system (Guba &
Lincoln 1994). It is a personal view of the way in which the social
world is and can be accessed and ultimately can only be argued on that
basis. There are concerns that have been raised about the
epistemological grounds for the archiving of qualitative data, some of
which I have addressed in this article. These objections are made from a
constructivist perspective, which respects the mutability of meaning
with context, but at the same time attributes the analysis of a
particular micro context with an immutable truth, denying its
relationship with a wider social context. While interpretive researchers
might make claims about uniquely constructed context dependent realities
and the contingent nature of these mutually-constructed realities, in
practice, almost all qualitative research makes claims to a wider
context through theoretical generalisations, through appeals to existing
social processes or as further examples of a social phenomenon. In other
words, a claim is made by the researcher to a more credible or
convincing (as opposed to more correct) version of a particular truth or
version of reality, which the reader of the research is encouraged to
accept on the basis of a research endeavour conducted in a particular
micro context. By so doing, they (and their research) become players in
a wider debate that does not cease with the end any particular research
project.

Even the most avowedly constructivist or anti-foundationalist
research project must contain a message or an idea that can be taken
beyond the context of the research act. The existence of knowledge,
social structures and tropes that are shared before and beyond the
research moment is essential for qualitative social science to retain
purposive legitimacy and knowledge generated using these meanings should
be available for ongoing interpretation.

It is on this basis that qualitative research must be open to
further analysis in the light of new context, when the process or
category of phenomena addressed by the original research is in need of
further or different theorising. The loss of special interpretive
insights of the original researchers should be more than compensated for
the ability of future social scientists to challenge our assumptions and
reflect upon the process of social change. The full and professional
reflexivity by the original researchers will make the task more fruitful
for future researchers. Earlier ways in which a complete project was
planned and executed can also only assist future researchers. Successful
archiving of qualitative material requires a cultural shift on the part
of those researchers who might at this stage remain wary or resistant.
This should not be seen as a short-term project. The archiving of data
with full and generous contextual material (Corti 2000), done in the
understanding that their own research should not be subject to
'verification' of the original research questions and
conclusions will go some way to achieving this.